Are your company’s overhead expenses getting out of control?

Have you even quantified all the myriad line items that may or may not qualify as overhead?

It would be nice if it was “never too late” to get a handle on your firm’s cash flow, but that’s simply not true. The clock is ticking, and fortune favors those who act fast.

These five strategies will help you bring one particularly pernicious expense under control: digital marketing. Have you implemented any already? And, if not, what’s stopping you?

Take Advantage of Free Plans

This is a catch-all tactic that applies to any — and hopefully every — marketing-related service your company needs. Whether you’re looking for a new email marketing suite, a customer relationship management tool, or an accounting platform to keep track of your marketing expenses, you can probably take advantage of a free or low-cost version.

These deals aren’t guaranteed to last — most have strict time or size limits. But you’d be remiss not to try to ride them as far as they’ll take you.

Get Rid of Legacy Debt

Set your marketing operation up for success by zeroing out high-interest legacy debts that may hamper its — and your company’s — financial soundness. If credit card debt is the issue, check out a recent roundup of the best balance transfer credit cards and choose the product that’s best suited to your debt load cash flow. Earmark some savings for your marketing budget. Just don’t spend outside your means, lest you find yourself back in the red.

Do Your Due Diligence on Audience Segmentation

The more audience segmentation work you put in up front, the more you know about the prospects for whom you’re doing all this. Said knowledge is essential — indispensable, really — to cost-effective marketing. Think of this as a foundational investment in your marketing apparatus: not quite something you’ll only have to do once, since audiences do change, but something that’s much better begun sooner rather than later.

Don’t Scale Too Quickly

Avoid the “spaghetti strategy”: throwing a dozen different campaigns per day at the wall to see which, if any, stick. Keep your marketing efforts small enough to track closely. When you see something working, double down by all means — but don’t rip into a half-dozen adjacent tactics just because this one thing shows promise.

Partner With Influential Publishers

No matter what your company does, your marketing team can find digital publishers willing to post content directly or indirectly tied to its operations or industry. Look for free or low-cost guest posting arrangements that offer mutual benefit: visibility and backlinks for your brand, high-quality content for your publishing partner. Talk about a win-win.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish?

Ever heard the saying, “penny wise, pound foolish”?

Take a hard look at whether that saying might apply to your business. If you’re adept at trimming needless business expenses and reducing overhead costs to manageable levels, you’re penny wise. If, at the same time, you’re not making necessary investments in your company’s future, you could be — sorry to say — pound foolish.

In other words, don’t starve your company of the growth capital it needs to meet arbitrary spending cut goals. Not every dollar is created equal; some tend to multiply.